Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL) Friday said its traffic and capacity for August rose 1.1% and 1.2%, respectively, while load factor stayed flat when compared to the prior year. Latin American and Pacific contributed strongly to system traffic, while domestic traffic as well as load factor were down.
The Atlanta, Georgia-based air lines system traffic for the month of August measured in revenue passenger miles was up 1.1% at 18.94 billion RPMs, helped by a 4.2% increase in international traffic, offset slightly by a 0.9% fall in domestic traffic.
Latin America recorded a 10.1% increase in traffic at 1.05 billion RPMs, while Atlantic and Pacific recorded an increase of 0.7% and 9.5%, respectively.
August traffic was better when compared with the 0.5% increase in July. Despite being pressurized by slowness in the economic recovery, Delta has been doing reasonably well in the past few quarter with a rise of 4.2% in June and 2.7% in May, after recording a decline of 2.2% in April.
Capacity measured in average seat miles were up 1.2% at 21.91 billion in August, on the backdrop of a 2.7% increase in International and a 0.3% increase in domestic regions. In July, capacity was down 0.3%.
Latin America contributed strongly with a 9.2% increase, followed by a 4% increase in Pacific and 0.6% increase from the Atlantic region.
Total system load factor remained flat at 86.5%, with domestic load factor recording a decline of one percentage points that was offset by a 1.3% rise in International load factor. In July, load factor was up by 0.7%.
For the month, 15.18 million passengers boarded Delta Air Lines, which was an increase of 0.3% when compared to the same month a year ago.
Total system cargo ton miles was down at 1.1%, hurt by 100% decline in Freighter cargo section, offset by a 26.6% increase in passenger cargo.
For the year-to-date period, system traffic increased 0.4% to 130.82 billion RPMs, while capacity dropped 1.6% to 156.13 billion ASMs. Load factor increased 1.7 points to 83.8% from 82.1% in the year-earlier period.
DAL is currently trading at $11.16, up $0.32 or 3.00%, on a volume of 4.69 million shares. In the last 52-week period, the stock traded in a range of $6.78 - $14.94, with a three-month average volume of 9.86 million shares.
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